note 78494 deleted from function.explode by peehaa

Note Submitter: pinkgothic at gmail dot com ---- coroa at cosmo-genics dot com mentioned using preg_split() instead of explode() when you have multiple delimiters in your text and don't want your result array cluttered with empty elements. While that certainly works, it means you need to know your way around regular expressions... and, as it turns out, it is slower than its alternative. Specifically, you can cut execution time roughly in half if you use array_filter(explode(...)) instead. Benchmarks (using 'too many spaces'): Looped 100000 times: preg_split: 1.61789011955 seconds filter-explode: 0.916578054428 seconds Looped 10000 times: preg_split: 0.162719011307 seconds filter-explode: 0.0918920040131 seconds (The relation is, evidently, pretty linear.) Note: Adding array_values() to the filter-explode combination, to avoid having those oft-feared 'holes' in your array, doesn't remove the benefit, either. (For scale - the '9' becomes a '11' in the benchmarks above.) Also note: I haven't tested anything other than the example with spaces - since djogo_curl at yahoo's note seems to imply that explode() might get slow with longer delimiters, I expect this would be the case here, too. I hope this helps someone. :)